The present disclosure relates to communication technology. In particular, the present disclosure relates to a method and a network device for realising zero configuration of a virtual distributed device.
CWMP (Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) WAN Management Protocol) is a technical specification initiated and developed by the DSL (Digital Subscriber's Line) forum, with a serial number of TR069, therefore also referred to as the TR069 protocol. It provides a general purpose framework, information specification, management method and data module for implementing the management and configuration of home network devices in the next generation network.
CWMP is mainly used in the DSL access network environment. In a DSL access network, due to the large number of client devices, their deployment being distributed, and often deployed on the user side, management and maintenance of these devices are often challenging. CWMP proposes remote centralised control of CPEs through an ACS (Auto-Configuration Server), in order to overcome management difficulties of CPEs, save maintenance cost and improve problem-solving efficiency.
Zero configuration is often used when deploying large-scale devices or when the distribution of the devices to be deployed is dispersed, which allows the automatic deployment of the corresponding configuration information by a network administrator upon power-on of the devices. Therefore deployment efficiency can be improve, and deployment costs and the probability of error in manual configuration can be reduced.
However, applying zero configuration deployment in software virtualisation technology to a virtual distributed device is different from the zero configuration deployment of a common single device. It involves the complexity of virtual uplink networking as well as methods for detecting deployment results, which create many problems for the zero configuration deployment of virtual distributed devices.
One such software virtualisation technology is VSS (Virtual Switching Systems). Another example is IRF (Intelligent Resilient Framework). The core concept of IRF is to connect multiple peer network devices via IRF physical ports, perform the necessary configurations, and virtualise the multiple peer devices into a single “distributed device”. Through the use of such virtualisation technology, it is possible to integrate hardware resources and software processing capability of multiple devices, thus realising collaborative operation, unified management and uninterrupted maintenance of multiple peer devices.